To force Congress to confront, before Nov. 8, 2016, whether it is badly corrupt or not, and to pass reform for voters to consider. To get started, click on "A. Declarations" at right.
Daddy, did you see the article about Chelsea "flagging 'serious concerns' about Clinton Foundation conflicts?" It's posted at Ivanka to President-Elect. Now there's the below AP story today about Eric. I think we really need to talk about this as a family. Love, Ivanka
PALM BEACH, Fla. -- One of President-elect Donald Trump’s sons will stop directly raising money for his namesake foundation, saying he worries the donations could be perceived as buying access to his father.
Eric Trump said Wednesday that it pained him to cease soliciting donations for his organization, which he says has raised more than $15 million for children terminally ill with cancer. The foundation came under scrutiny recently after posting an online auction for coffee with his sister Ivanka.
“Fighting childhood cancer is a cause that has been central to my life since I was 21 years old,” Eric Trump told the Associated Press. “It’s an extremely sad day when doing the right thing isn’t the right thing. That said, raising awareness for the cause will be a lifelong mission for me.”
Trump, the younger of the president-elect’s two adult sons, has raised enough money over the last decade to fund a new intensive care unit at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which provides free medical care for children. But criticism mounted after an invitation offered a hunting trip with Eric or his brother Donald Jr. in exchange for donations of $500,000 or $1 million to a new charity that Eric Trump supports.
Both the coffee and hunting ventures have been scuttled.
News of Eric Trump’s decision was first reported Wednesday by The New York Times.
Eric Trump said he will likely wind down the Eric Trump Foundation - which had just one employee - but plans to continue public advocacy against childhood cancer. About $5 million of a $20 million, 10-year commitment to St. Jude’s remains outstanding, money that likely will be raised by donations from patrons at Trump-owned hotels and golf courses.
Don Jr. and Eric Trump, who were among the Republican businessman’s closest campaign advisers and have played an active role in the transition, are planning to remain in New York to run the massive Trump Organization once their father takes office. Critics have demanded the president-elect divest himself from his business. He was to have addressed the future of the company at a press conference last week, but it has been postponed to January.
The future also remains murky for the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a separate charity run by the president-elect that solicited outside gifts and has been criticized for using donations to fund business interests.
In the constitutional oath of office, the President-Elect solemnly swears (or affirms) that he will "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States . . .."
President-Elect Trump said in his interview with The New York Times that "the president can’t have a conflict of interest."
That, and other things he and his transition team have said, seem to give no recognition to the word "faithfully" in the constitutional oath of office.
Electors might, before they vote, require a written statement to be submitted by President-Elect Trump that he is aware of the word "faithfully" in the oath of office and that such statement set forth the President-Elect's understanding of what "faithfully" means relative to his conflicts of interest (in fact). Such statement might also address what role the President-Elect believes Congress has to play, including whether Congress has the power to make its own determination of whether a President is faithfully executing his office, and the power to impeach the President if the Congress determines that the President has not faithfully executed his office.
Chelsea Clinton flagged “serious concerns” about her father’s closest aides trying to cash in by using the former president’s name to gain access to government officials on behalf of paying clients, according to hacked emails released this week.
The emails, which were disseminated by WikiLeaks, reveal bitter tensions within the Clintons’ inner circle that were inflamed when Chelsea Clinton tried to put an end to practices that blurred the line between the foundation, governments and a consulting firm called Teneo that paid Bill Clinton.
Some of the concerns raised by the former first daughter echo attacks that have been dogging her mother, Hillary Clinton, during her presidential campaign. Clinton’s GOP rival Donald Trump and other Republicans allege that the Clintons used their foundation and private business arrangements to enrich themselves by essentially auctioning off access to the powerful family and their associates in government — including during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
Teneo, in particular, did lucrative work for foundation donors and entities with business before Clinton’s State Department. And it signed a contract reportedly worth $3.5 millionwith Bill Clinton to serve as an adviser (though the former president ultimately kept only $100,000 of that, according to his tax returns and a source familiar with the arrangement). Teneo also paid Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s right-hand woman at the State Department, as a “senior advisor.”
One of the pair of Clintonites who founded Teneo, Declan Kelly, was working for Clinton’s State Department while laying the groundwork for the firm, as revealed by POLITICO. POLITICO also exposed that the other Teneo founder, longtime Bill Clinton aide Doug Band, was drawing salaries from both the Clinton Foundation and the former president’s taxpayer-subsidized personal office, while another early Teneo official, Justin Cooper, was being paid by Clinton’s taxpayer-funded office, even as he was performing maintenance on Hillary Clinton’s controversial private email server.
In December 2011, Chelsea Clinton sent a sharply worded email to top family confidants saying that people in London had raised "serious concerns" about the way Teneo was using her father's name to set up meetings for clients, according to private emails released by WikiLeaks. "I will raise all of this and more with my father this evening," she wrote. "Wanted to update you all in the meanwhile about my augmented concerns post London."
At the time, Chelsea Clinton had already been pushing to enact tougher rules at the foundation regarding conflicts of interest and outside income. In response, Band blasted her behind her back as an irrational ingrate who runs “to daddy to change a decision or interject herself in the process.”
In the emails released by WikiLeaks on Monday and Tuesday, Band dismissed Clinton as an entitled and power-hungry young woman who wreaked havoc at the Clinton Foundation — and who created a stressful environment that contributed to one person's contemplating suicide — simply because she was bored and protective of her relationship with her father.
“She is acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she's doing because she, as she has said, hasn't found her way and has a lack of focus in her life,” Band wrote in a November 2011 email to longtime Clinton family adviser John Podesta.
Band added that Teneo “has almost nothing to do with the Clintons, the foundation or [the Clinton Global Initiative] in any way.”
Podesta urged Band to try to avoid sparring with Chelsea Clinton, but at the same time he was emailing with her and others in a manner that seemed to validate Chelsea's concerns about setting up outside procedures for dealing with Teneo.
A former White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton, Podesta is now serving as the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and the emails WikiLeaks released came from his personal account.
Podesta and Band did not respond on Tuesday to questions about the emails, nor did representatives for Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton or the Clinton Foundation.
Glen Caplin, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, declined to answer questions about the dispute over Teneo, instead alleging that the hack was the work of Russia and intended “to help Donald Trump become President of the United States.”
While U.S. intelligence officials have fingered the Russia government for other hacks intended to influence the presidential election, there is no evidence that Russia is behind the hack of Podesta’s emails.
Podesta has been a close personal adviser to the Clintons for decades.
In late 2011 — the period covered by most of the WikiLeaks emails related to the foundation and Teneo — Podesta agreed to serve as the Clinton Foundation’s temporary CEO after its longtime CEO, Bruce Lindsey, the Clintons’ longtime Arkansas lawyer, suffered a stroke.
Podesta inherited an organization that was still being run to some extent like a Bill Clinton personality cult steered by the former president’s friends and former aides, even as it had grown into a $2 billion global philanthropy credited with major breakthroughs in fighting childhood obesity and AIDS.
At the time, Chelsea Clinton — newly married, bearing an Ivy League master’s degree in public health and coming off stints on Wall Street and at the consulting powerhouse McKinsey & Co. — had joined the board of one of the foundation’s subsidiaries and begun seeking to instill data-driven management techniques across the foundation.
Clinton initiated a 2011 audit by the New York law firm Simpson Thacher focusing partly on “potential conflicts of interest.” The firm conducted 38 interviews with employees and officials, explaining in a Simpson Thacher document released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday that “many interviewees were unaware” of the foundation’s policies related to conflicts of interest and outside employment.
Chelsea Clinton’s efforts to reform the foundation were perceived within the foundation as a vote of no-confidence in Band, Lindsey and the Clinton old guard, according to interviews with a handful of sources who worked with or around the foundation.
During a November 2011 meeting, Band complained to Bill Clinton that his daughter’s efforts to implement conflict of interest rules were actually a thinly veiled effort “to push him out, take over,” according to an email from Chelsea Clinton to Podesta. “Dad kept asking him — has she said that to you? To anyone? She's never said it to me and I think she's been very clear and consistent in her goals, etc.,” Chelsea Clinton continued in the email, which was sent from a pseudonymous email address bearing the name Anna James and associated with New York University, where she served as an assistant vice provost.
Those goals, according to Chelsea Clinton’s email, “were to help to take stock, professionalize the Foundation, build it for the future and build it in such a way that supported his work and mom's.”
But, as POLITICO reported last year, Chelsea Clinton, who had by that point become the foundation’s vice chair, was seen by some in the foundation’s rank and file as distant and intimidating, while some officials saw her as using her relationship with her father to get her way.
In a December 2011 email to Podesta and Cheryl Mills, who was then serving as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff in the State Department, Band alleged that “the stress of all of this office crap with [Bill Clinton] and [Chelsea Clinton]” had contributed to pushing a top foundation official to the brink of suicide.
And Lindsey “said the stress of specifically the office had caused his very serious health issues,” according to Band’s email. Lindsey did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the foundation official who Band indicated had become suicidal, who has since left the foundation.
Band suggested that Chelsea Clinton should have been more concerned about “her role in what happened to” Lindsey and the allegedly suicidal staffer, as well as “what she is doing to” the Clinton Foundation, and with stories about her father’s marital infidelity.
Instead, though, Band contended in a January 2012 email to Podesta, Mills and family friend Terry McAuliffe (now the governor of Virginia) that Chelsea Clinton was courting trouble by openly telling people outside the foundation “that she is conducting an internal investigation of money within the foundation.” According to Band’s email, which was released Tuesday, Clinton relayed this to “one of the bush 43 kids,” who “then told an operative within the republican party … Not smart.”
In another email, Band suggested that Chelsea was trying to drive a wedge between him and Bill Clinton by highlighting a news story reporting that a controversial financial services firm called MF Global had been paying Teneo $125,000 a month.
In fact, Chelsea Clinton had forwarded a version of that story in December 2011 to Podesta, Lindsey, McAuliffe and two Simpson Thacher officials. Clinton requested that the story be added to the news clips presented to her father, presumably via printouts, since he eschews email, suggesting that negative coverage of Teneo is typically kept from him.
Chelsea Clinton indicated that during a trip to London “two people separately voiced concerns directly to me about Teneo,” while a third told her chief of staff that a Bill Clinton staffer “has called Members of the House and Members of Parliament, ‘on behalf of President Clinton,’ for Teneo clients” including Dow Chemical, a major Clinton Foundation donor.
These calls, according to Chelsea Clinton, were made “without my father's knowledge and inelegantly and ineffectually at best.” The situation has led to “people in London making comparisons between my father and Tony Blair's profit motivations. Which would horrify my father.”
Podesta responded: “We need to move to a resolution of this quickly,” to which Clinton agreed, asking whether Mills and McAuliffe had made any progress working out an agreement with Band and Cooper relating to outside income.
Less than two weeks later, Mills emailed Podesta, Band and Cooper with a draft of a document proposing what it called an “Infrastructure Model” for the Clinton Foundation.
The draft outlined a number of proposed structures for handling Bill Clinton’s personal, political and foundation business, but the common theme in each is that Band and Cooper would be less central to the operation. They would “not have any obligation or authority regarding the implementation of decisions,” the document says, and “would no longer serve as either employees or consultants to the Foundation; should the Foundation or its affiliated entities desire their services, they would engage them directly, through a personal consulting contract, to provide mutually agreeable services.”
A later draft of the document indicates that Bill Clinton’s role with Teneo — which it says began in July 2011, with Clinton serving “as an advisor to Teneo in support of its establishment and start-up” — would end. “Commencing January 1, 2012, the President instead will become a client of Teneo; Teneo principals will provide consulting services to the President in his personal capacity.”
On Dec. 22, 2012, a Simpson Thacher official forwarded to Mills and Podesta a draft of Bill Clinton’s letter resigning from Teneo’s advisory board, in which he said he applauded “the wonderful work that you are doing, and I wish you and the firm all success in the future.”
Band continued to be paid by the Clinton Foundation into 2012, and by Bill Clinton’s taxpayer-subsidized personal office through January 2013, but he has since become distanced from the family, even as Teneo’s clientele continued to overlap with the Clinton Foundation’s donor rolls.
Josh Gerstein and Nolan D. McCaskill contributed to this report.
To: AL legislative delegation; AL Governor; AL Attorney General
During a rally in Colorado, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment that would impose term limits on members of Congress. (The Washington Post)
Donald Trump wants to make members of Congress step down after a few years. But it's wishful thinking, mostly for these four reasons:
1) The Supreme Court says passing term-limit laws is unconstitutional.
In 1995, the Supreme Court decided in a 5 to 4 vote that states or Congress can't just make a law limiting the number of terms members of Congress can serve. The decision essentially wiped off the books term-limit laws that 23 states had for their congressional delegations. (The decision didn't affect term limits for state legislatures, and there are 15 states that impose them.)
The court said that for term limits to be constitutional, we'd have to amend the Constitution.
And actually, changing the Constitution is exactly what Trump proposed Tuesday:
“If I'm elected president I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. They've been talking about that for years,” Trump said in a speech in Colorado championing his new package of ethics reforms. “Decades of failure in Washington and decades of special interest dealing must and will come to an end.”
But there's a problem with that idea, too. And it's:
2) Constitutional amendments are really, really, really hard to pass.
Presidential candidates routinely call for constitutional amendments, but rarely with success.
For one, changing the Constitution requires one of the hardest things to do in politics. It requires an agreement by a two-thirds supermajority of Congress and then to be ratified by three-fourths of states, or 38 out of 50.
Only 27 proposals out of countless ideas in our country's 240-year history have climbed that steep hill.
This isn't the first time Trump has proposed one this campaign cycle alone. Back when he and other GOP presidential hopefuls floated the idea of changing the 14th Amendment to eliminate birthright citizenship, I dove into the circumstances surrounding those 27 changes to our Constitution. I found that the United States is often only spurred to change it under extenuating circumstances, such as political crises, war and death.
3) Many political scientists think term limits are a bad idea.
There is evidence that term limits create more competitive elections, said Josh Chafetz, a law professor and congressional expert with Cornell University. But he said most political scientists would agree that term limits don't make sense in a body that deals with as many complex issues as Congress. In fact, paradoxically, term limits could increase the power of those who can stay around the Hill for as long as they want: lobbyists.
“If members are restricted to only serving a few terms,” Molly Reynolds, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution told The Fix in an email, “the logic goes, they have neither the time nor the incentive to develop the relevant expertise they need to be good at their jobs. If members don’t have that expertise themselves, they’re more likely to rely on outsiders, including lobbyists, to replace that expertise.”
4) Congress would probably never agree to it (and never has).
Trump is right, imposing term limits on Congress isn't a new idea. Politicians — especially those on the right — have been floating the idea for years as a way to crack down on corruption. The thinking goes that once a lawmaker spends too much time in Washington, he or she becomes part of Washington and incapable of effectively serving people outside of it. So let's put a limit on how long they can be in Washington.
But once those pro-term-limit lawmakers get into office, very, very few of them have actually tried to put their words into action.
Back in 1995, when the Supreme Court ruled term limits unconstitutional, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted on four versions of term limits. But three of those proposals, as the New York Times reported at the time, even failed to get a bare majority. There really hasn't been a major push for term limits since.
And that makes sense when you think about it: Why would lawmakers agree to campaign for a job they're just going to leave in a few years?
Some lawmakers have decided to impose their own term limits. But history is littered with broken term-limit promises. Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) resigned his seat in 2000 to honor a campaign pledge to retire after three terms. But in 2011, he was back, saying the idea of term limits is flawed unless everyone agrees to them.
“When it came to getting committee assignments it harmed me,” hetold the Weekly Standard in 2004. “When I say harmed me, I mean it harmed my district.” (Salmon says he's retiring at the end of this year.)
We're picking on Salmon, but lots of lawmakers have and continue to run for office despite making campaign pledges to leave office at a certain date.
In other words, proposing term limits for Congress is a popular thing to say on the campaign trail. But it's not such a popular thing to advocate for once you're actually in Congress. And of all the reasons Trump's term-limit proposal won't happen, this is probably the most salient: Congress doesn't want it.
Amber Phillips writes about politics for The Fix. She was previously the one-woman D.C. bureau for the Las Vegas Sun and has reported from Boston and Taiwan.
The President-Elect has also proposed lobbying bans applicable to Congress and Congressional staffs. Congress should consider these proposals for fixing itself. Members of Congress should decide, and announce to their constituents, where they stand on the proposals. The voters should demand this of their Senators and Representatives in Congress. For doing this in Alabama, see AL Cong'l delegation lobbying ban positions.
WILL CONGRESS BE FLAT ON ITS BACK?
President-Elect Trump has, since the election, said and done things which are suggestive that he would just as soon have Congress flat on its back, in order that he as President can have his way on every matter of governance of interest to him. For this purpose, President-Elect Trump may lose complete interest in anything to "fix" Congress. Members of Congress should evaluate this and figure out whether Congress is going to "fix" itself just so that it will be able stand up to President Trump.
